I was skeptical about the goat. But then it emerged, almost as if it were etched into the rind like an image in an optical illusion. “Do you see it? With the horns . . . and the mouth?” asked Jennifer Billock, who practices tyromancy, the art of divination through cheese. Tyromancy was first mentioned in the second-century writings of Greek historian and professional diviner Artemidorus of Daldis, a man who hated cheese and felt cheese divination sullied the work of true diviners.
Chicago-based Billock began our Zoom tyromancy session with a brief history. “Cheese has always had a role in magical practices dating back to ancient Greece and Rome,” she said. “Both Greeks and the Romans included cheese in their offerings to deities.” She mentioned that if you’re traveling to the United Kingdom, you can visit a cheese well in Peeblesshire, Scotland, where centuries ago people threw pieces of cheese into the well as offerings to the fairies in hopes of a bountiful harvest. “If the fairies liked you and your offering, then you would have an excellent harvest; if not, your crops would die.”
Prior to the Zoom, Billock had asked me to choose four cheeses—Past, Present, Future, and a Question—and to email her photos of the labeled wedges. “The best type of cheese for readings overall is usually a blue,” said Billock, adding that veiny cheeses or cheeses with texture are best for tyromancy. The Mediterranean medley was procured from my favorite New York City cheese shop, Murray’s. My pick for the
Past was Moliterno al Tartufo, a Sardinian sheep’s milk cheese with truffle ribbons. For the Present, I chose Tuscany’s Pecorino Oro Antico, “ancient gold”. And for the Future, I went with Andazul, a blue cheese made in the Spanish Andalusian mountains from the milk of rare Payoyo goats. Moving through Past, Present, and Future, one of the main takeaways was that listening to my intuition was improving over time. “You just need to pay attention,” Billock advised.
Billock, a published travel writer, has been reading tea leaves and doing other forms of divination since childhood. “At the start of the pandemic, I learned tyromancy used to be a common divination method, and since I love cheese, I taught myself to do it,” she said. “It took a couple years of research and test sessions before I was comfortable enough to start offering workshops.”
Jennifer Billock, tyromancer, ready to see the future through a collection of cheeses
For my Question cheese, I’d originally selected an aged Manchego—but when I learned that my friend could join our Zoom from Croatia, I swapped it for Paški sir (Pag cheese), a six-month-aged sheep’s milk cheese from Pag Island, Croatia. Martina Pernar Škunca—who heads marketing at Paška Sirana, one of the factories that produces the island’s award-winning cheese—provided a wedge specifically for the tyromancy session, since the cheese was otherwise sold out across the USA. Because this cheese and its island home inspired my debut novel, The Cheesemaker’s Daughter, my question was: How will future travels impact my creative life?
The forecast looked good: “Your dragon is flying right into this flower, which is taking initiative to move forward and go into a place of growth,” Billock said, hovering over the patterns on the rind with her cursor. “So it’s just going to help your creativity bloom even more.” She then pointed out the shape of a butterfly, which represents “moving forward into a place where you can expand your wings, expand your mind, expand your creativity.”
She added, “The travel questions I get are usually if someone will go on a trip soon, when they’ll go, where they’ll go, if they’ll have a good time. So I’m looking for things in the cheese that might give that information away.” Billock explained that divining with cheese involves examining the shape and number of holes, the depth of the holes, the pattern of the mold, the scent, and other features. “The interpretations are really similar to other forms of divination like reading tea leaves, coffee grounds, or eggs,” she said. She recently saw the shape of Iowa in someone’s cheese next to an image of a plane and told the woman she was probably going to Iowa sometime in the next month or so. “She freaked and told me that she had a trip planned to go to Iowa in two weeks. Spooky!” Billock said.
The session ended with the very cheese that revealed the astonishing goat image in its rind. The goat appeared as part of the Bonus Question asked of a Croatian cheese called Dalmatinac, made from cow’s and sheep’s milk, which Billock procured from her local cheesemonger in Chicago, Beautiful Rind.
My question: On August 30, I’m going to a cheese festival on Pag to promote my novel. How do I make the most of that time? “The best advice that this goat is telling us is to really just go with the flow as much as you can,” Billock said. “There may be obstacles or things that come up that seem tricky, but the goat is going to just chew through them. So as long as you are tenacious and keep a good attitude and are willing to adapt to the changes that are coming, then that’s ideal.” That goat—and the cheese—gave pretty good life advice.
Get your own cheese reading: Jennifer Billock offers in-person and Zoom tyromancy sessions. Visit KitchenWitch for more information. ($45 per solo session or per person for groups up to five people; $30 per person for group sessions of six people or more; addition $10 per person if Billock purchases the cheese)
